Journey with scuba instructor Michael Zinsley as he dives his way through 16 countries, rubbing shoulders with the locals and mixing underwater adventure with after-hours escapades. The Rapture of the Deep is fast paced and rich in content, consisting of humorous anecdotes, insightful histories, underwater descriptions, and terrifying close calls.
Excerpts From The Book
It was an inspiration that started while I was working as a high school teacher in Los Angeles. I enjoyed teaching, but stressful conditions made me miserable. Feeling trapped by the city, I spent evenings watching sunsets from my balcony while televisions flickered on the window shades of the apartments around me. I saw my lifetime as a book, but my future was written before me as a tale as monotonous as those of my neighbors. I dreamed of an edition filled with a series of adventures, tightly packed to fit into my given volume of life. Those porch sunsets beckoned me across the ocean, to mysterious lands where bills, taxes, and dull routine would disappear.
At the end of the school year, I accepted a position as a professional mountain guide, but I soon realized it wasn't what I sought. Hacking and thrashing my way up some godforsaken mound of ice-covered rock with clumsy customers on the end of my rope had lost its appeal. Continuous weeks above timberline left little time for a social life. I would march to each summit secretly hoping that the dream girl I had never met might somehow find out about my heroic ascent and surrender herself to me in fairy-tale awe. Instead, I returned from every plod to share a cold wet tent with another male climber who also hadn't bathed in awhile. To top things off, the pay was so lousy, we had to live out of our cars on days off.
It was time to continue my quest for Eden, and becoming a diving instructor on a tropical island seemed to be an ideal choice. I could still have adventure, pursue my dream girl fantasy by investigating the diver-as-playboy stereotype, and be in a place where a hammock and a piņa colada awaited me at the end of each day instead of a damp tent. Also, unlike mountain guiding, if inexperienced customers inadvertently tried to kill themselves with uncoordinated antics, I wouldn't be tied to them.
However, I quickly discovered... Nobody mentioned long evenings filling tanks, unclogging boat toilets, or sweeping floors when I was signing on the dotted line. I started to miss family, friends, hot showers, and Mexican food. It also seemed wasteful that after going to engineering school, the only ratio I was calculating was rum to pineapple juice.
In New York City, I once complained to a friend over dinner about slaving for an incompetent shop owner in the Caribbean. He leaned over the table and pointed his finger at my face. "Hey! They could whip you down there, and it would still be better than wearing a suit to work in Manhattan every day!"
He was right. I wouldn't have traded lives with him under any circumstance. I was far from the daily grind of freeway rush hour, in a place where vacationers from all over the world made an effort to maximize their fun. Winter had friends at home bundled in coats while I flourished in the warm caresses of the trade winds. Brilliant starry nights spent outside under the Southern Cross also reminded me that I was doing fine right where I was.
I also enjoyed introducing people to the underwater world and watching their excitement grow as they discovered it. Over four-day courses, I helped them hone their skills until they could safely dive without me. My approach was left over from the mountain days - leading innocents into a formidable challenge and working them through it to build the confidence they needed. Weakness was their greatest enemy. Self-sufficient adventure was their greatest thrill. No whining was allowed.
The following chapters are a blend of travel stories and anecdotes, most of which were written overseas...
The locations change throughout the book as I explore dive sites in new countries: from Australia and the South Pacific, to the wonderland of Palau, over to the Caribbean, back to Palau, and finally to the unbelievably unfamiliar environment of Southeast Asia.
My visits to these lands varied from one week vacations to working stints of a year or more. Whether Palangi, Haole, Farang or Turis, the names all meant the same; I was the big white guest. I saw many vacationers projecting their own world onto the foreign environments they visited, thereby missing out on the full travel experience. Unlike them, I spent enough time in each country to become absorbed in the lives of the local people. In fact, I didn't have much choice. The surrounding cultures seized me and pinned me until I said "Uncle." This is the story of my encounters with these people, as well as the close calls, the humor, and the nomadic life of a professional diver.
